If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Senator Ralph Northam, a Democrat, and Chris Stolle, a Republican member of the Virginia's lower House of Delegates, this year shepherded a resolution through the legislature spending $50,000 on a comprehensive study of the economic impact of coastal flooding on the Virginia and to investigate ways to adapt.

To pass the bill, at Stolle's suggestion Northam excised the words "relative sea level rise" from an initial draft of the bill, replacing them with "recurrent flooding" in the final version.

Northam describes the change in language as pragmatic politics - necessary to win support from conservatives sceptical of climate change science.
"If you mention climate change to them, it's like a big red flag," he says. "A barrier goes up. That's the way it is here in the Virginia."

CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

I find his tone sanctimonious and self-serving. He criticizes the IPCCC while pointing out that they are right, and have been, for a precious lost decade. He continues to doubt the causative relationship between global warming and extreme weather events, even though a strong consensus of other researchers now see that causality. This will be, no doubt, his next brilliant revelation, in another few years, after he buys more time for the oil and coal industry with his "skepticism."

Now he just needs to convince his benefactor to change their minds and do something positive, instead of ripping us all to shreds.

Arctic sea ice has broken a new low record. Basically in the last 40 years the summer ice pack used to be the size of the continental USA and now more than half of it has melted away. That is a lot of melting ice.

While there are different methods employed to determine "arctic ice extent" they all measure ice area. Measuring ice thickness in combination with extend gives a number for arctic ice volume. Since the ice has thinned in most areas, the decline in volume is even more drastic.

There used to be decade old layers of arctic ice. Today 2/3 of ice are younger than 1 year. You can see that from the image below, where winter ice extend is ~15m square km. The remaining 1/3 is few years old and thinning. My conclusion is, it won't take another 33 years for the minimum to reach zero. If I add a 3rd grade polynomial trend line to the ice area extend curve posted by Dave, the curve hits zero in year 2024 -- but that's of course a completely bogus thing to do